This area of the city is characterised by large, tall buildings with a mixture of uses. The structures along The Gingerbread City harbour’s edge were originally industrial - but recently have been redeveloped and found new purpose providing active frontages at ground level and create a lively waterfront.
The layout of the buildings creates a consistent waterfront edge with public access and walkway. Next to the former industrial site lie new residential blocks with a strong focus on sustainability and high-quality public realm.
If you're keen on this sort of exciting redevelopment, check out trains to cities with fabulous reinvented areas like Liverpool, Frankfurt or Madrid.
This area of The Gingerbread City’s masterplan is split up into several individual plots. Teams from architecture and design companies were asked to pick one of these plots – and then supply a bespoke gingerbread building appropriate for it. Over the past few months, the wonderful buildings below have been conceived, designed, crafted, and baked by them to fit.
The buildings of the Sustainable Quarter
Fruitcake Club
Allies and Morrison
Circular baking principles steer this design concept - from re-using existing buildings to specifying (delicious) materials to ensure this new build can be reused/composted. This approach takes the ‘existing’ Victoria-Sponge Cake Factory: reusing, re-fitting and re-icing, keeping the fine grain character of the site as new green routes and spaces are introduced along the waterside. A feature has been made of the wharf buildings - whilst a dolly mixture of new uses have been added including the Fruitcake Club: hosting a revolutionary dance floor, generating energy from the dancing of the gingerbread citizens!
About the designers: Allies and Morrison - architects, urbanists and planners - are based in London and work in cities worldwide. Across all their projects, they are concerned with the crafting of every detail and an appreciation for the uniqueness of each context.
Candy Cloud
Apt
There is no better place to have a sugar rush than in the Candy Cloud, the most sustainable restaurant in the Gingerbread City. Carved into the baked slope, this building is designed to be highly energy-efficient. It uses hydropower generated by the sugar canal and it reduces heat losses with a sophisticated cladding created by candy cells. Once powered by the sweet rain, these cells transform into sustainable flying pods, specially designed to deliver all of our sweet treats throughout the City. Don’t feel like cooking today? Come and visit or call the Candy Cloud!
About the designers: Apt are a practice to deliver the unexpected, who creates architecture that inspires through great design, experimentation and collaboration. They are a collective, diverse in skills and backgrounds and who share a passion for celebrating art, innovation and craftsmanship that is inspired by its context. They address how people interact with the products, buildings and spaces they design. Through an engaging design process of sketching, model making, drawing and discussion they deliver beautiful buildings that people talk about and enjoy.
York Fruits House
Chapman Taylor London
The design for the York Fruits brewery reinstates the building’s original purpose, creating a craft beer and cider micro-brewery with a lively bar and events space. Produce for brewing is grown in the glasshouse, ‘The Orangery’, which is also a waterfront bar which offers a revitalising, biophilic experience for customers. A restaurant attached to the brewery via a modern extension with a landscaped roof terrace has a large glazed frontage to maximise transparency. Brewing ingredients not sourced on-site or nearby will arrive by barge, with kegs of cider and ale shipped to other parts of Gingerbread City and elsewhere.
About the designers: Chapman Taylor is an award-winning practice of global architects and master planners, known for designing places and buildings that are both creative and successful. Established in 1959, the practice has longstanding relationships with many of the world’s leading developers, contractors, consultants, investors and brands.
Digestive Heights
Chapman Taylor Manchester
This residential site has been constructed using the latest innovative recipe in modernised sustainable transportation. Pre-baked apartment modules are delivered and stacked on-site using the clean, renewable, hydrogen balloon system. The unitised façade consists of an array of the ‘bestselling’ cladding biscuit - the digestive. The bespoke digestive panels are designed to incorporate biophilic balconies for residents to enjoy unrivalled views over the neighbouring Jammie Dodger Urban Farm or delight in the sounds emitting from the adjacent Opera House. A glazed roof-garden connecting the two blocks provides a tropical oasis for green-fingered residents to grow their beloved sugar cane.
About the designers: Chapman Taylor is an award-winning practice of global architects and master planners, known for designing places and buildings that are both creative and successful. Established in 1959, the practice has longstanding relationships with many of the world’s leading developers, contractors, consultants, investors and brands.
Flapjack Heights
EVA Studio
The proposed design looks at tackling the Gingerbread City housing shortage with incremental gingerbread housing solutions with pre-baked modules. Whilst the bakers will provide low-cost and urgently-needed production of new gingerbread homes in the short term, gingerbread home-owners will carry out a progressive personalisation and expansion overtime when funds become available. The possibility of rearranging and extending the gingerbread floor plan layout and its residential/commercial uses, within a given duplex-based gingerbread structural module, will provide more affordable and deliciously gingerbread homes.
About the designers: EVA Studio is a design-based practice undertaking social projects of different scales and uses, from public spaces, schools, housing to urban design masterplan. The practice design and research studio is headquartered in London with an overseas branch in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Wire Rack Square
Hynes-Laitt Studio
A busy community space for gingerbread residents to cool after baking. Sweetsellers and icing face-painters gather to decorate the gingerbread community and storytellers recount fairy tales to the gingerbread folk and their jelly babies. Three renovated sugar silos provide high calorie treats for tired and hungry gingerbread. Rooftop candy cane turbines catch the hot air and signal the sugar rush to the Gingerbread City. The Dance Instituttifrutti Nightclub provides spicy entertainment for cool late-night revel-lers. Self-powered by a fruit drop kinetic dancefloor, gingerbread are encouraged to dance ‘as fast as they can’ until dawn.
About the designers: The practice’s recipe for success involves a creative and open-minded approach, some very experienced design chefs, and a patisserie of happy customers. Their unique blend of creative skills will transform your basic ingredients into fine architectural showstoppers.
Mr. Gingerbread & Sons Biscuit Factor
Lee Evans Partnerships
A redevelopment of the factory into the shared ownership residential Amaretti apartments. A self-sustained community of 3 generations - stale and fresh gingerbread under one roof - with public uses within the existing building, such as crèche, gym etc. A cycle path down from upper levels wibble wobbles around the sugar cane windmills connecting to the Jammie Dogger farm and Gingerbread Waterfront through the courtyard. The existing biscuit warehouse takes over the first two stories with boiled sweets for windows and the new apartments are to be constructed out of Amaretti biscuits of different sizes with lit up Apertures.
About the designers: Lee Evans Partnership LLP is an award-winning multi-disciplinary design practice with studios in Canterbury and London. The Partnership has an ethos derived from a passion for design, enthusiasm for building, and a commitment to excellence
Watermelon Peaks
nimtim architect
The Watermelon Peaks will act as a beacon to the city as well as being a destination for entertainment. It will be a place to interact in a number of indoor and outdoor social activities such as dancing, skiing, climbing and cycling. Twinkly cavernous interiors create monumental spaces for getting your gingerbread groove on. Triangular roofscapes become a mode of transport for the active gingerbread person. Dropping in for a drink or dinner has never been so easy.
About the designers: nimtim makes architecture that is a celebration of colour, material and personality. People are at the heart of how the practice thinks about and create buildings. Their projects reflect the characters and personalities of the people who live/work/ play in them.
Custard Cream
Peter Dann London - Structural & Civil Engineers
The Custard Cream has inspired a twin-walled structure (like the biscuit) supporting cascading residential units which on one face will pay homage to the biscuits iconic styling. The other elevation will have an ultramodern glazed façade, and the roof provides green spaces for residents. The circular community hub will be a central facility for local residents to enjoy and benefit from. The building will have a 360-degree cantilevered balcony with plentiful clear glazing, while the roof will feature stained glass, letting natural light flood into the building. Both buildings will be created from a modular kitchen facility.
About the designers: An award-winning engineering consultancy specialising in structural and civil design. Their experience includes commercial office space, modular hotels and residential developments including student accommodation, industrial plant/manufacturing facilities, restoration and heritage projects, civil infrastructure, medical facilities and retail schemes.
Bourbon Blastoff
Pitman Tozer Architects
With rent prices skyrocketing throughout the galaxy, citizens of Gingerbread City traverse the commuter belt on the only viable option, the reusable solar-powered Bourbon Blastoff. Frequent service connects the city to various tasty locations throughout the Milky Way, reducing the amount of hobnobs that are clogging up the skies with unnecessary single-use space travel. With suitable planet-ing, the Bourbon Blastoff has eclipsed its competition – despite spacing out - to become the best way to visit a parking meter. Take a comet book on the journey and check your Facebook account before the Rocket-ing sends you to the skyway.
About the designers: Pitman Tozer are a growing studio of energetic, engaged and curious architects. They co-create schemes, each with a distinctive identity, borne out of considered research into the social, cultural and environmental nature of a place. The studio’s expanding portfolio for public and private clients includes large scale mixed-use regeneration projects, buildings for education and high-quality homes.
The Buttersea Power Station
Stride Treglown
An industrial warehouse had fallen into disrepair. With sustainability in mind, the concept of creative-reuse to re-purpose the ruins into a sustainable ‘energy-from-waste’ plant for the city was created using modern interventions to bring the building back to life. Inspired by how transport is powered, and how power is generated in an innovative and sustainable way, sugar and candy waste is collected from the city’s inhabitants via boat and tram and delivered to our site. It is then processed and sustainable energy is generated to feed back into the city, powering the transport and infrastructure.
About the designers: This practice is a tasty recipe of built environment studios. 330 different experts each belonging to nine regional offices. A rich mixture of thinkers, designers, doers and bakers of the built environment who are passionate about improving the lives of everyday people.
Flour Tower
Tibbalds Planning and Urban Design
Flour Tower is the horticultural centre of the city. The vertical farm provides a bright space to grow fresh produce, and the ground floor hosts an educational centre to run workshops to inform residents about urban agriculture. The Beehive encourages and sustains the local honeybee population, and the café and farm shop sells all the products grown on-site. Cycle parking, as well as a fleet of cargo bikes are available for distribution to local schools and shops. The centre facilitates the full lifecycle of food production — thereby reducing Gingerbread food miles.
About the designers: Tibbalds Planning and Urban Design is an independent, award-winning consultancy established in 2003. Its team of planners, urban designers, architects and engagement specialists focus on the cross over between planning and urban design with the philosophy of making people-friendly places for the benefit of those who use them.
Rich Tea Residences
UHA London
Nestling proudly in the sought after Sustainable Quarter, the Rich Tea Residences are oriented towards a classic ‘London’ square where gingerbread citizens socialise year-round. Residents enjoy baking summers on communal terraces located at all levels and frosty winters in the ground floor wellness suite and spa. The central and surrounding landscape of the residences is carefully contoured to follow the flowing lines of the terraced residences and allow citizens to meander leisurely from the Sugar Loaf Mountain Gondola along to the Urban Farm.
About the designers: UHA is a 24-hour studio. A collective of architects, designers, and urbanists collaborating across time zones as a singular global studio designing dynamic architecture. They are a multilingual, multinodal studio with offices in London, Mumbai, Limassol, & Lisbon.